Deborah Bloomfield

Recently, we met Ameca, a half-impressive, half absolutely terrifying robot with realistic facial expressions, designed to be a smooth interface between human and robot interaction. It’s all incredibly “Uncanny Valley”, but nonetheless a remarkable display of current technological improvements.  Well, Ameca just got an upgrade. A team of UK researchers have added the use of […]

In the 1970s and ’80s, a group of people living in the jungles of Mindanao Island in the Philippines caught the attention of both the media and anthropologists. The first time was for their discovery, and the second for alleged fraud. The Tasaday people were first “discovered” in 1971. Reports claimed that 26 people were […]

The oldest heart known to science has been discovered in the remains of an ancient, jawed fish, along with a stomach, intestine, and liver to boot. The 380 million-year-old fish organ smashes previous records by a comfortable 250 million years and is shedding light on the evolution of even human bodies. It comes from an […]

The origin of Saturn’s spectacular rings and its mysterious and peculiar connection to Neptune could have a single solution. Saturn used to have another moon that fell into the planet and some of its fragments went on to form the incredible rings that now adorn Saturn, a new study speculates. Scientists have decided to call […]

We might think we know how water behaves, but we’ve been overlooking what happens when it gets into spaces so small it’s just a single molecule thick. The outcomes turn out to be very different from water in bulk. Water’s three familiar phases of matter – solid, liquid, and gas – can lead to icebergs […]

The shockingly high death toll from COVID-19 is “both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels,” says a new report by the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. A huge interdisciplinary team of researchers reviewed evidence from the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic to see what could have been done better and […]

A rare type of fossil was retrieved recently from the Morrison Formation of southeastern Utah when researchers realized they had found preserved vomit. Inside the small regurgitalite was a gathering of amphibians, including at least one small frog and a salamander that might be the smallest ever found in the region. Fossil vomit is a […]

Despite their popularity, it’s no secret that multivitamin supplements are completely useless for most people. Aside from giving you some especially expensive urine, they make little difference to your health, and might even raise your risks of certain cancers and heart disease. However, a new study might have found an exception – for older people, […]

People aged 65 and over had a significantly higher risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease within a year of contracting COVID-19, according to a huge new study of 6 million people. When compared to the control group, there was a 50-80 percent increased risk of developing the neurological disease in people infected with COVID-19, […]

If current trends continue, Christians could soon become a minority in the US within just a few decades, according to a new report. Social trends like this are notoriously hard to predict, but it’s evident that the number of people following Christianity in the US has been slipping since the 1970s – and little seems […]

When COVID-19 first came onto the scene at the tail-end of 2019, the health advice was simple: it caused ten days or so of fevers, coughs, and trouble breathing, and that was about it. Since then, though, a plethora of symptoms have been added to the list, and “long COVID” – the vernacular name for […]

A bright fireball shot across the night sky over the UK and Ireland Wednesday evening sparking almost 800 reports of a possible meteor to the UK Meteor Network. The spectacle, captured in multiple videos and shared online, is now being investigated by scientists. Whether it was a visiting space rock or space junk is not […]

It’s pretty much impossible to truly imagine the consequences of launching a nuclear strike and killing millions of innocent people. This might not be a problem for you, as you will (almost certainly) never have to make a call about whether to use nuclear weapons. But, if you do have the nuclear codes on account […]

All over the world dinosaurs laid billions of eggs, some of which never hatched. Quirks of geology have meant that more of these have been preserved in China than elsewhere. The Qianshan Basin is an exception. Although rich in mammal, reptile, and bird fossils, it is only recently that three dinosaur eggs were discovered there. […]

We were not ready for this incredible mosaic of Mars collected by NASA’s Perseverance: a combination of 1,118 individual frames stitched together to create a 2.5 billion pixel landscape.  You can see the granularity of the Martian sand, the effect of the wind, hairline fractures of rocks, and the sedimentary layer left by drying mud […]

Over 6.5 million lives have been lost so far, but the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is now “in sight,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO). However, they went on to stress that this last leg of the race won’t be easy.  “Last week, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 was the […]

“Intelligence” is a concept we usually associate with, say, Sherlock Holmes. You know – he’s rational, logical, not necessarily good with people, but goshdarnit if he can’t solve an expert-level killer sudoku in record time, and that’s what’s really important in life.  But that isn’t the only way we can be intelligent. Emotional intelligence – […]

The more narcissistic the US president, the more prolonged their wars tend to be, according to a new study. In sum, the eight US leaders who scored above average for narcissism spent an average of 613 days at war, while the 11 least narcissistic presidents were at war for just 136 days. Study author John […]

A paper co-authored by a senior scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory DeepMind has concluded that advanced AI could have “catastrophic consequences” if left to its own methods of achieving goals. The paper – also co-written by researchers from the University of Oxford – is centered around what happens if you leave AI […]